Library Company of Philadelphia
Dr. Lindsay DiCuirci’s Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) traces the labors of a nineteenth-century cultural network of antiquarians, bibliophiles, amateur historians, and writers as they dug through the nation’s attics and private libraries to assemble early American archives. The collection of colonial materials they thought themselves to be rescuing from oblivion were often reprinted to stave off future loss and shore up a sense of national permanence.
However, Dr. DiCuirci argues that instead of revealing a shared origin story, these historical reprints testified to the inveterate regional, racial, doctrinal, and political fault lines in the American historical landscape. #LCPFellowFriday